I’m often asked how I like Estonia and my answers are always very positive I think. In my explanations I generally compare things to France and I sometimes feel bad for my home country, maybe I’m too tough with it… But then when I read such things I think it deserves it:

France may soon enact the worst copyright law in Europe, sneaking it through in a legislative session scheduled for December 22 and 23.
…
* A prohibition on all software that permits transmission of copyrighted material that does not integrate both a watermark and DRM
* A prohibition on marketing or advertising such software
* These prohibitions include legal sanctions
* DRM mandates for digital radio transmission
* A universal wiretapping system for private communication
* Creation of a universal filtering system for all ISPs

And in related news, there is some lobbying happening to ban Free Software!

Leaves me without words.

Already a few weeks ago they banned usage of Skype in universities for stupid reasons. The French news paper Liberation has a good article (in French, machine translation) about this, called “security, a commercial weapon against Skype”.

Update: Ars Technica comments on the subject. Worse than the DMCA…

Update 2: Edited title to clarify confusion, this is not a France-hater post, but a post about a stupid legislation in my country.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 3rd, 2005 at 3:25 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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